3. The Downside? OPACs – To Nextgen or not? Privacy concerns Digital divide Permanence? Firewall issues
4. 2.0 Tools to Help with… Staying connected with Library Users Delivering quality information to Library users Building community Marketing library services Professional development
5. IM & SMS (Texting) Services Meebo (meebo.com) Text-A-Librarian (textalibrarian.com)
6. Blogs, Wikis & CMSs Open source: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki (Wikipedia platform) Library applications: SOPAC (Drupal), Scriblio (WordPress), Koha (ILS) Commercial tools: LibGuides, Aquabrowser, Primo
As Librarians we love to collaborate and share with each other and with our usersLibrarians seem to have natural affinity for the latest generation of web tools and have really embraced themAlthough some critics have suggested that librarians hop on the bandwagon for every new technology that comes along, what these tools allow librarians to do really reflects so many of our core values of openness, access, and fostering conversations, so are a natural fit
But there’s also a clash or conflict between traditional curatorial values and this new openness. Opening up and letting go has been a challenge for some. OPACs – some concern that user-contributed content, ratings, reviews, etc. might undermine the integrity of the OPACLibrarians zealously guard their patron’s privacy. Since so many of these tools require users to reveal a little something about themselves, and considering that people do this willingly, and in many cases unwittingly, where does this leave us?Digital have-nots. Entrance to just about all the tools we’ll talk about today require at a minimum of a high-speed internet connection. Access to the internet is essential to an informed citizenry. Who’s being left out of the conversation? According to the Pew Internet in American Life Survey, broadband access has increased substantially- but only 63% of adult Americans have broadband access as of April 2009. Fear that tools may become obsolete or irrelevant (Second Life?). Understandable fear of jumping in too soon or betting on the wrong horse. Firewall issues – some IT depts. block Facebook and YouTube.
Talk given a few times over the last couple of years. Devoted at least a couple of slides comparing 1st gen web technology to 2nd gen or 2.0 technologies. Don’t think I need to do that anymore. 2.0 technologies are the web as we know it today. Major characteristic is tools taken power away from the traditional gatekeepers, newspapers, governments, corporations, libraries and put very sophisticated communication tools in the hand of average web user. There’s a downside to this of course (decline of civility, fragmentation), but a net gain for society as a whole.
Meebo – web-based IM client – consolidate your IM accounts and access anywhere. Chat widget embed in web pages and blogsTexting services – 1) buy and phone and plan or 2) go with web-based service like Mosio’s TAL. Since most people (rich and poor alike) have cell phones and pervasiveness of texting, this would appear to be a logical medium for developing library services.
One also thinks of openness (open APIs, open source software) in connection with 2.0 technologieseven though the open source movement predates web 2.0 by almost a decade. Open source – source code available for free (yours to install, use, adapt, develop). Software maintained by the user community. Wordpress– popular open source blogging platform. Install from source wordpress.org or hosted at wordpress.comSome librarians have begun to exploit the possibilities of OSS for library uses. Advantages, integration with other resources, user-contributed content (ratings, tags, reviews). Commercial Systems: LibGuides, Aquabrower, Primo, Encore (Discovery layer)
LibGuides is a commercial CMS with a lot of 2.0 funtionality built-in.Share via social networks and social bookmarking tools. Place for comments, Twitter and IM contacts, Embedded podcasts. Many librarians embed a meebo chat widget like we saw a few slides back in their LibGuides so users can chat with them.
The ease of embedding chunks of code or widgets in other websites is another notable characteristic of these social media tools. It’s another avenue to promote collections and services and extend library’s reach.
So– Why should you or your library have a presence on social networking sites? Many: Professional networking, promoting your library, saving libraries from the budget ax! The Twitter hastag#saveohiolibraries was effectively used to keep library supporters informed about budgets cuts in Ohio. The Facebook group has nearly 60,000 members. I’ve warmed to Twitter over the past year. I now see it at a powerful PR and marketing tool. Use it to keep your users informed about library events and services.
Instructional screencasts and videos are a great educational and outreach tool that extends the reach of library user education. Numerous avenues for distribution (iTunes, YouTube). Burritt Library Adventures in Research show on blip.tvLots of commercial and free tools for screencasting (Captivate, Camtasia, iShowU). Free ones like camstudio, wink, screenrScreenr – cool tool, all browser-based. Make a video and tweet it or publish to YouTube
RSS is a way to syndicate news. People can subscribe to a newsfeed in an RSS reader like Bloglines or Google reader.
Most blogging software has RSS capability, so users can subscribe to updates. Here I’m subscribed to my library’s blog and can recycle this content in a variety of ways: email, repost, tag
You can also search, aggregate and disseminate RSS news using a tool like Yahoo pipes, which let you create to pretty sophisticated mashups w/out programming skill. Uses: reputation monitoring, gathering and disseminating topical information. So, it’s back to school for CCSU so I thought I would create this feed with news items about CCSU
You can see that I can do a whole lot of sharing of this pipe… via Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking tools like delicious. I can add to my RSS reader or embed in my blog or webpage. If you have RSS feeds from your library catalog, you can create pipe to search for certain keywords.
OCLC app uses geolocation to map you to the nearest library. Both apps are a free download.